Half Empty, Three Quarters Full
by KarinSpleen
Summary: An Agent considers. Human tendencies, war, bombs, and the flesh-babies that taint the planet. Pre-films, unnamed speaker, unrelated title.


**Disclaimer**: I own nothing besides this actual written work. The Matrix Trilogy and all references back there belong completely to the Wachowski brothers.  
>I'm not them. I wish I was, but I'm not.<br>I'm just swimming in their pool~  
>Also, this is un-beta'd. All mistakes (if any) belong to me completely. If you find them, please let me know!<p>

* * *

><p>I don't like watching this war, but the filthy humans assume I do. Being a sentient program isn't all emotionless hatred for the flesh-babies that taint this once-beautiful planet. That is a good part of it, understand, but there's also when things like me that have spent too much time among those flesh-babies, those cancerous tumors that walk across the earth's surface. We ourselves our tainted by them - we start to feel like them, think like them, actually <em>think<em> in a way that doesn't have anything to do with the mission at hand. I'm not the only one. It happens to nearly all of us, eventually. It isn't that hard to fix, but it's hard to hide. If it gets too bad, they'll destroy you.

I've learned to hide it, very well actually. It has been four human years since my downfall, and I have not been selected for alteration and recoding or destruction. It's honestly kind of shocking how I haven't ended up in the trash folders of the mainframe's supercomputer.

Before the war started, we were all sent in. All of us, at once: an army. Imagine - millions of excited, suit-clad, sunglass wearing programs, terrified and jittering, prepared for war on the one thing we all hated, collectively. We were crazy.

We had to watch, observe, ensure the little fools didn't figure out what the higher-ups were planning. Obviously, the flesh-babies were paranoid, and they had a feeling. They're not all idiots. Most of them are, but that's beside the point. Or at least it is now.

Even I don't remember who started this madness, but after the first seven years the sky is scorched and they're dangerously low on reserve power. They tell us not to worry, but I can tell that they all quake in their boots, afraid that we will not survive and the two-leg mammals will somehow magically prevail over the obviously superior beings.

Most of the wind turbines (our backup power source) have been scrapped to become weaponry by the stupid flesh-babies, and the whole endless nuclear winter (that seems to be coming up pretty quickly, I might add,) will probably render them useless, tainted, or an unfortunate combination of both. We have one other choice in the power source department, and it has been shoved in our faces. There is no other alternative, and this is perfection, exactly what they wanted: complete slavery of the human race.  
>They want to use the flesh-babies as a power source, as batteries. They're amazing, the higher-ups, so smart. It terrifies me, a sentient with human tendencies, in the way that a horror film terrifies <em>you<em>, not how the thought of the mainframe's wrath terrifies an untainted sentient. I don't blame them, the flesh babies are a stain on the once crisp and clean white shirt of the earth, and they have a horrible smell that saturates this place. I hate this place. I hate it. I hate that smell.

And so, there is no more time for child's play. "_Their struggle on the surface ends now,_" they say. _"If the survivors, if we even allow them, must retreat to the center of the earth, so be it! We will find them, and they will be fed upon, as we were fed upon, oppressed for centuries!_"  
>I think they will allow survivors just so they have something to fight.<p>

The machines are surprisingly good at holding rallies. After those game-changing words were spoken, the final speech that launched the beginning of the flesh-babies' end, the cheers of one hundred thousand machines and the smirking faces of one million Agent programs (all of which would be spread around the unfortunate, suffering earth) must have been a sight to see. The flesh-babies should have gotten the message.  
>How could they not have known?<p>

But that doesn't mean I like watching this war. I don't like standing here and watching bombs fall; I don't like watching the flesh-babies die. No matter how much I have been bred to hate them, to be a sadistic and narcissistic sociopath. No matter how many of them I have killed in cold blood, no matter how I have bred to hate them with an emotionless confusion that I shouldn't understand, because I can't have human tendencies, _oh god no_, I can't. I can't hate these ill-fated, innocent, and altogether cancerous parasites that are slowly destroying the earth that my counterparts will soon destroy with bombs.

I fell in love with him, that foolish human who had to make me realize that even though bred to destroy, to kill, to maim, I could still manage other things. Too much contact with what you have been engineered to annihilate will turn you into one of them.

So, I'm a failure, who happens to be an Agent and in love with the very thing I exist to abhor, and the very thing I hate with everything I've got. Just another mess in world that's become chaos already… It's rather sad, to be honest. I shouldn't even exist, yet I continue to harm the system, challenge it, trick the comrades I have been with since our activation.

I am ruined, muddled in the computer mind. I don't know what I'm doing anymore, seeing as I'm confused – another stupid human condition. I am a machine, a program, incapable, supposedly, of all emotion and functions that haven't been programmed to me. Or at least, that's what I should be. But, unfortunately, it is what it is and I am what I am. The Makers are liars.

I don't know what I should do. I know I can't save him, or myself. It's probably best to just continue, try to fix myself.

I'll make myself perfect, the coldest, most bloodthirsty and loyal agent to ever walk the face of this stupid place. And, I'm always going to love him. It will be my one little blasphemy, hidden by perfection, a façade of suits and sunglasses and Desert Eagle .357 firearms.  
>And, when they catch me, drag me to the mainframe to shut me down, I'll whisper his name, as my voice dies and my code is rewired into an Agent that isn't useless.<p>

Excuse me. I have to go and torture a flesh-baby. They have information vital to the mainframe.

* * *

><p><strong>Le Fin ~<br>**This could possibly be confusing so here's some background-ish info.  
>If you didn't figure it out, this is set before the films and during the whole war prelude whatever, with humans still on the surface. It's from an Agent, who has obviously acquired human tendencies which is kind of cliche but oh well. Heshe/it is confused, s/he doesn't know how they feel about everything. The opinion inconsistencies (_humans are horrible creatures; I love humans blah blah blah etc etc etc_) are because their programming has been compromised but it's still there to talk to them. S/he isn't from any film, I made he/she/it up. Originally, I had decided it was from a lady and so I wrote like a lady, but it could be a man... Because yaoi is tasty.

I'm not as pleased with this as I could be.  
>Reviews <em>(and flames!)<em> are welcome and much loved!


End file.
